Lapps and Labyrinths



Once upon a time, all humans in Europe were nomadic hunter-gatherers.  Today, we know little about those prehistoric wild folks.  Over the centuries, farming, animal husbandry, ceramics, textiles, and other technologies from the Middle East slithered westward into Europe.  Eventually, almost all of the wild folks were either absorbed into the turbulent new culture or eliminated by it.

In Europe, the far north was one of the last regions to be colonized.  Around 15,000 years ago, it was buried under a sheet of ice that was a kilometer thick.  Then, the climate warmed up, and by 8,000 years ago, the northern interior of Sweden was no longer hidden under an ancient glacier.

Humans began moving into some parts of Scandinavia about 10,000 years ago, along with the reindeer, moose, wolves, bears, seals, and other pioneers.  The descendants of these early humans are known as Saami or Lapps (“Lapps” is insulting to some).  For thousands of years, they were largely disconnected from European civilization.  Some forest dwelling Saami remained hunter-gatherers until the end of the nineteenth century.

There are now maybe 70,000 Saami.  They call their ancient homeland Sápmi.  Four modern nations claim sections of it: Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia.  In the past, Saami groups spoke nine different languages.  These belong to the Uralic family of languages, which emerged west of the Ural Mountains of Russia.  Uralic languages include Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, and Samoyed.  The Saami in western Sápmi look Scandinavian; in eastern Sápmi they look more like Inuit.  Their language includes 400 words for describing reindeer.

In the 1980s, archaeologist Noel Broadbent was engaged in routine research on Iron Age seal hunting in Sweden and Finland, along the northern coastlines of the Gulf of Bothnia.  One day, in the Västerbotten region of eastern Sweden, he discovered evidence of a ritual bear burial, which made no sense whatsoever, because it spit in the face of sacred myths — and myths often trump reality.

Bear burials could only be Saami business.  The myths said that Swedes were the original settlers of Sweden, and the scruffy Saami were exotic aliens that wandered in from elsewhere a few hundred years ago.  The myths said that Saami were reindeer herders who lived in the interior, and Swedes were the ones who settled the coast and began seal hunting settlements.  On, the coast, Broadbent had stumbled across an inconvenient truth, and a significant one.  The bear burial forced a sharp turn in his research.  He rolled up his sleeves and became a myth buster.

Broadbent reported his Saami findings in Lapps and Labyrinths.  It does an excellent job of documenting his archaeological research in Västerbotten — lots of charts, graphs, tables, illustrations, maps, and detailed technical information.  It’s not written for general readers, it’s not a pleasure to read, but it is readable, and it delivers many fascinating insights on these wild folks of prehistoric Europe.

The Saami were fortunate to inhabit a region that was far from ideal for farming, or herding cattle, sheep, and goats.  Six month winters are not easy for tropical primates.  Unfortunately, Germanic peoples, who farmed and herded, were being driven by population pressure to expand northward — folks who are now called Swedes and Norwegians.

What followed was similar to the later conflicts that arose between European settlers and Native Americans — their language, music, and spirituality was banned.  Kids were sent away to boarding schools.  Much of their land was privatized by settlers.  This put the squeeze on traditional hunting, so many shifted to reindeer herding.  The Saami were forced to perform hard labor in silver mines and construction projects.  The formerly wild and free became taxpayers, required to give the king furs, skins, feathers, fish, and so on — this put additional stress on wildlife.

The Saami were nomadic.  In the warm months, reindeer grazed in the mountains; in winter, they moved to the forest and dined on lichen.  At the coast, the Saami hunted seals on the late winter ice.  In the autumn, when the skins, blubber, and meat were at peak quality, they returned to catch seals in nets.  Three months were devoted to seal hunting.  Along the shore, Broadbent’s research uncovered thousands of bones from seals, reindeer, hares, ducks, moose, and bears.  Ninety-eight percent of the bones were from seals.

On the coast, they caught salmon, whitefish, cod, herring, and shellfish.  In rivers and lakes they caught salmon, perch, whitefish, pike, burbot, trout, and char.  When the catch diminished, they simply moved to another lake.  When game got scarce, they packed up their lavvo (teepee) and moved on.  In summer, they feasted on raspberries, bilberries, blueberries, crowberries and bearberries.

The Swedes were sedentary, betting their lives that luck and cleverness would allow them to survive in one permanent location in the wilderness.  It was a harsh life.  Farming was small scale, and very risky, in a land where late spring frosts, and early autumn frosts could nuke their crops overnight — and often did.  Too much rain could rot their crop.

The wild Saami didn’t soil their britches when a wolf killed a reindeer, because they didn’t own the reindeer, and wolves needed to eat.  What could possibly be more normal, natural, and healthy?  Duh!  Saami wisdom understood that everything was spiritually alive: humans, animals, trees, winds, streams, blizzards, northern lights, and so on.  Their entire reality was magnificently sacred.  They were always careful to remain quiet and respectful, because shouting and loud disturbances profaned the holiness of their home.

Saami people had great respect for bears, highly intelligent magical beings who slept all winter without eating, and then returned to life when warm breezes blew.  Every spring a bear was killed and eaten in a holy ceremony, and then its bones were lovingly buried.  It was a celebration of rebirth, renewal, and profound admiration for the bear people.

Swedish settlers depended primarily on their cattle, goats, and sheep.  These provided milk, meat, hides, wool, and fertilizer.  For six months animals could graze outdoors, and for six months it snowed and snowed.  In places, it could get up to 3 meters (10 ft.) deep.  Animals were jammed together in shelters, eating stored hay.  In warm months, pastures sometimes got baked by droughts, eliminating the forage.  Sometimes rain preceded haymaking, damp hay rotted in the barns, and animals sickened and died.  In remote settlements, dry hay could not be hauled in from elsewhere.  Sometimes epidemics of animal diseases wiped out the herds in a region.

Sometimes predators dropped by to have lunch with the herd, which always resulted in settlers violently soiling their britches, jumping up and down, and shouting impolite comments.  Settlers were law abiding royal subjects, and they were obligated to regularly make generous contributions to the friendly bailiffs who collected taxes for the king.  The animals were private property, living wealth, and status symbols.  The more you owned, the better.

The primitive devil-worshipping Saami hung out with the reindeer people, herbivores who were perfectly adapted to the chilly climate of Sápmi, needed no barns, ate lichen all winter, and took care of themselves.  The Saami did not suffer from tax collectors and tithe collectors.  They were free.  They inhabited their Sápmi homeland for thousands of years without causing permanent injuries to the ecosystem.

Beginning in A.D. 829, a mob of radicalized black robed terrorists began to stomp in from down under, and build churches on holy sites.  The Saami were perfectly happy with their own spiritual beliefs, so converting the small population took 300 years.  They learned to act like faithful believers, whilst privately preserving their ancient culture.

A bit later, the Saami were shocked to discover that they had mistakenly converted to a fake religion, according to the new Lutheran black robes, who hated both Catholics and the Saami.  In the 1600s, the Lutherans and the state began a brutal crusade of compulsory conversion.  Resisters were beaten, some were killed, especially shamans.  Sacred drums were confiscated, smashed, and burned.

Swedes were encouraged to move into the “vacant” wilderness and settle.  Population grew.  Women lost status.  Saami were driven away from the coast and other prime locations.  By and by, Sápmi country was savagely molested by money hungry road builders, miners, loggers, trappers, sealers, and fishers.

Oh, before I go, here’s an interesting fact.  By 8,000 years ago, the glaciers had melted away, raising the sea level.  At the same time, because there was no longer immense weight on the land, the land rose in elevation (called isostatic uplift).  “Stone Age sites in northern Sweden are found on old beaches that have been uplifted 120 m or more (393 feet).”  The Bronze Age coastline is now 20.5 km (12.7 miles) inland from today’s coastline.  Land uplift has greatly altered the waterways, lakes, and fjords over time.  Many old water networks and harbors dried up.

Finally, what are labyrinths?  Broadbent discovered some of these along the coast.  They were spiraling stone constructions made up of single lines of stones forming walkways toward a center point.  More than 300 have been found in Sweden.  Labyrinths were built by Christian settlers, mostly in the sixteenth century.  They were symbols of protection, indicating that the land was no longer corrupted by dangerous heathen devil worshippers.  Labyrinths are found in many regions of Europe.  Ironically, they were originally invented by pagans.

Broadbent, Noel, Lapps and Labyrinths: Saami Prehistory, Colonization, and Cultural Resilience, Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, Washington, D.C., 2010.

A print version of Lapps and Labyrinths can be purchased from Amazon.  A free PDF version of the entire book can be downloaded free [HERE].

The Sami is an easy to read, colorfully illustrated, 86-page PDF produced by the Sami Parliament in Sweden.  It contains info on the modern Sami, their history, traditional spirituality, and struggles as an oppressed minority.

Other peepholes into Sápmi:

The Sámi People: Pastoralism vs. Agriculture

Sámi Traditional Worldview

Early Sámi History

Sámi Learning and Education

The Significance of the Bear Ritual

Shamanic Roles and Practices

A gorgeous 4-minute video of Saami, reindeer, and their land is [HERE]

The Last of the Nomads



Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to introduce you to Yatungka and her husband Warri, the last two Mandildjara people to live in the traditional way on the Western Gibson Desert of Australia.  William Peasley wrote their saga in The Last of the Nomads.

Aborigines have one of the oldest continuous cultures on Earth.  They have lived in Australia for at least 40,000 years, some say 60,000.  Nomads first inhabited the more fertile regions, leaving the deserts for later.  Folks have lived in the Gibson for maybe 20,000 years.  Most readers, if dropped off in the Gibson, naked, with a spear and boomerang, would be dead in a day or three.  Water is extremely scarce.  For the paleface colonizers, the desert is dangerous, miserable, a land of horrors.  For Aborigines, it was home sweet home, where they belonged, a sacred place.  They had an intimate understanding of the land, and learned how to live in balance with it.

Yatungka and Warri spent most of their adult lives as pariahs, because their relationship violated a tribal law that defined permitted and forbidden marriages.  Laws were taken very seriously.  If they returned to their people, they might be beaten, or even killed.  So, their family lived away from the tribe, wandering from waterhole to waterhole, hunting and foraging.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the government made efforts to move the Aborigines into settlements, where intense culture shock led many to lose their identity, become massively depressed alcoholics, and abandon their ancient traditions.  The sons and kinfolk who stayed with Yatungka and Warri eventually moved off to civilization, but the outlaw couple feared to join them.

Anyway, in 1977, it was the third year of an extreme drought, the worst in a century, maybe the worst in many centuries.  The kinfolk of the outlaw couple were worried about them.  Mudjon was a respected elder who had been raised on the desert in the traditional way.  He knew all the waterholes, and cared about Yatungka and Warri.  His dream was to take the Mandildjara people back to their desert paradise, return to the old ways, and preserve their traditions.  Few of the young were interested.

Mudjon asked a white friend to help him search for the couple, and he agreed.  Mudjon was joined by five white lads, including Peasley.  They loaded up three vehicles and took off across the vast roadless desert.  Mudjon knew that this was probably his last visit to the territory of his people, and the last time a traditional Aborigine would drink from each well, or leave footprints in the dirt.  Peasley noted, “It was very sad for him to move through the land where once his people hunted and laughed and sang around the campfires.”

The chapters describing the long search contain some fascinating passages about the old way of life.  Mudjon was a master at reading the land, noticing the countless slight details that provided strong and detailed messages to him, but were invisible to the whites.  Without a map for the 1,500 km (932 mi) journey, he guided the team from waterhole to waterhole, looking for signs of the couple.  It was a powerful experience for him, to see old campsites, windbreaks, caves, springs, rock paintings, and other artifacts — the remains of an ancient culture.

Eventually they found signs of the missing couple.  At several locations, Mudjon started a brushfire that sent smoke high into the sky, where it would have been visible from up to 160 km (99 mi) away.  Warri did not respond with a smoke signal.

It was an ancient custom of the desert people to routinely light brushfires as they journeyed from waterhole to waterhole.  This had three benefits.  (1) Fire flushed out hidden game.  (2) It signaled their progress to other groups.  (3) It regenerated the earth and stimulated plant growth.  Fresh green sprouts attracted game.  Wildlife became dependent on burning.  This was called firestick farming.  In recent decades, in regions no longer visited, the burning has ceased, the water holes are not kept cleared, and animal and bird life largely disappeared.

One happy day, they saw smoke from Warri, and drove to his campsite.  When Mudjon greeted him, there were no smiles, hugs, or handshakes.  Warri was about 150 cm (5 ft) tall, naked, extremely thin, and both eyes were inflamed.  He wasn’t strong enough to hunt, so they were living on quandongs (peach-like fruit).  Yatungka returned from foraging with several dingo dogs.  She displayed no signs of excitement.  She was about 165 cm (5’ 5”) tall, younger, naked, very thin, but in much better physical condition.

They would not survive much longer at the waterhole.  The rescue party knew that the nearest well that still had some water was 150 km (93 mi) away, an impossible journey on foot.  The couple agreed to return to the Wiluna settlement with Mudjon and company.  They wanted to see their sons again.  Mudjon assured them that there would be no drama about the taboo violated long ago.

In Wiluna, many folks came to look at the long-missing couple, and were stunned to see their emaciated condition.  “There were no greetings, no shouts of joy, in fact there was no sign of recognition on either side, and yet the sons of Warri and Yatungka were within a few meters of their parents.”  Tears streamed down the cheeks of Warri and many others.  A few months later, Mudjon got very sick, declined, and died.  A year after their return, Warri and Yatungka caught a disease.  He died in April 1979, and she died a few weeks later.

For me, this was a powerful book, not primarily for what it said, but for the silent message unperceived by the white heroes who came to the rescue.  Peasley spent his boyhood on a farm in Australia, and he sometimes discovered signs of prehistoric campsites.  He felt sad that, after more than 40,000 years on the land, the people had not been able to leave behind anything more significant than simple campsites, grinding stones, rock paintings, and so on.

For me, this low impact living was an amazing achievement.  They successfully adapted to a hot dry ecosystem, and it was a wonderful home for them.  What a terrible problem!  The Gibson Desert that the rescue party drove across looked nearly the same as it did 1,000 years ago, or 10,000.  The silent message screams “genuine sustainability, beautiful, healthy culture!”

Humans are also capable of adapting to godforsaken nightmares like Chicago, jammed together with millions of isolated, anxious, stressed out, depressed strangers… ah, the wonders of progress!  The rescue party was proud of their advanced technology, which gave them the ability to dominate, exploit, and rubbish the continent.  What significant artifacts will they leave behind to impress the youngsters of generations yet to be born?  Will the land be in no worse condition in another 1,000 or 10,000 years?  These questions are taboo, heresy in a culture whose god-word is Growth.

Peasley did confess to having some uncomfortable thoughts.  When the rescue party knew that the couple was alive and nearby, he realized, “We were about to intrude into the lives of the last nomadic people in the Western Gibson Desert, and in doing so, it was possible that we might be responsible for bringing to an end a way of life that had gone on for several thousand years.”

Peasley, William John, The Last of the Nomads, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, Australia, 1983.

The Last Nomads is a 45 minute Australian documentary of this story.

The Future Eaters provides an environmental history of wild Australia, the early human impacts, the mass extinctions, and the lessons painfully learned.

The Life and Adventures of William Buckley tells the story of an Englishman who abandoned civilization and spent 32 years as a hunter-gatherer in the early days of Australian colonization.

The Ainu Saga

Once upon a time, I was flipping through an encyclopedia of hunter-gatherers, and came to the Ainu section, the wild people of Japan.  There was a photo of a longhaired man, with a long beard, standing knee deep in a stream, a fish hanging from his spear.  I was immediately fascinated.  The image did not blend in with my other images of Japan — images of highly efficient people who spend their stressful lives indoors, as we do.  The wild man struck an ancestral chord — many of my wild European ancestors were salmon people, too.  I had to learn more.

Japan is not an archaeologist’s paradise, because the climate is wet and the soil is acidic, so much of the evidence from the past has been erased (annual rainfall is up to 120 inches / 300 cm).  No one knows when humans arrived in Japan, but it was not less than 32,000 years ago.  During the ice ages, sea levels were sometimes 500 feet (152 m) lower than today, and there were periods when land bridges connected Japan to Korea and mainland Russia.  All the main islands of Japan were also connected.

In Paleolithic times, Japan was home to mammoths, Yabe giant deer, Naumann elephants, giant elk, brown bears, steppe bison, wild boars, Siberian lions, aurochs, wolves, tigers, and horses.  This also did not fit into my image of Japan, because it was so incredibly wild, pure, and powerful.  Our modern world is so empty.  Most of these large animals vanished between 15,000 and 10,000 years ago, and humans played a role in this, as did a changing climate.

The standard folk history declares that the Japanese were the original human inhabitants of this land, but modern research strongly indicates that they didn’t arrive until maybe 400 B.C.  The Japanese seem to be closely related to the Koreans, but this notion is extremely offensive to both nations, because of centuries of fierce mutual loathing.  The immigrants from the mainland got rolling on the island of Kyushu, in southern Japan (close to Korea), in what is called the Yayoi period, which spanned from 300 B.C. to A.D. 300. 

When the Yayoi colonists arrived, Japan was already inhabited by the indigenous Jōmon hunter-gatherers.  The Jōmon period spanned from 12,000 B.C. to 300 B.C.  The analysis of DNA and skull shapes indicates that the Jōmon people were more closely related to the Ainu than the Japanese.  They lived in a land blessed with an abundance of wild foods, a paradise for hunter-gatherers.  This enabled them to live in permanent villages, in population densities that were unusually high for hunting people.  They may have engaged in horticulture on a small scale, and they probably planted useful trees.  They had no livestock, chiefs, or classes.

The Yayoi colonists were poor mainland farmers moving into a land of prosperous hunter-gatherers.  Japan was also a farmer’s paradise.  Rain was abundant during the summer growing season, which led to plant productivity that was well above average.  Some locales may have planted two crops per year.  In the wake of 12,000 years of Jōmon stability, the invasion of Yayoi farmers sparked an era of accelerated ecological disruption, which continues to this day.

The colonists imported the Iron Age to Japan.  They brought full-scale wet-rice agriculture and full-scale warfare (moats, watchtowers, metal weapons, and abundant battle casualties).  They brought domesticated pigs, wheel-thrown stoneware, and hierarchical society.  Rapid population growth spurred ongoing expansion into the lands of the wild folks.  From their start on the southern island of Kyushu, they spread northward, onto the main island of Honshu. 

It is likely that the ancestors of the Ainu once occupied all the islands of Japan.  Many locations have place names that are Ainu, including Mount Fuji (Fuji means fire goddess).  The Ainu language has no relationship with any other language.  In their appearance, the Ainu resemble Caucasians, but their genes are Asian.  The men have long beards, and “the most profuse body hair of any people,” according to Jared Diamond.

Over the centuries, the rice farmers spread northward, eventually occupying much of the main island of Honshu.  Hokkaido and northern Honshu remained Ainu turf for a long time, because the climate was not ideal for rice, and invaders were clearly unwelcome.  The Ainu heroically resisted ongoing Japanese expansion, fighting major battles in 1457, 1669, and 1789.  They lost all three, and eventually fell under Japanese control.

Meanwhile, the Portuguese arrived in 1543, bringing with them guns, missionaries, and smallpox.  The visitors were expelled in 1639, having worn out their welcome.  Missionaries were either killed or deported.  Their 300,000 converts had to choose between renouncing their faith or death.  All guns were rounded up, melted down, and recycled into a huge statue of Buddha.

Japanese farmers acquired two new exotic crops, potatoes and sweet potatoes, both highly productive.  A population explosion soon followed.  By 1720, Tokyo was the biggest city in the world.  To feed the growing mob, efforts were increased to acquire more food from the Ainu regions, via unsustainable commercial hunting and fishing.

Eventually, the Ainu became dependent on the trading posts for their survival.  Acquiring goods, primarily rice and sake, required them to hunt and fish at levels well beyond traditional subsistence levels.  At the same time, diseases like smallpox, measles, cholera, and tuberculosis took a devastating toll.  By the time of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the Ainu were powerless to oppose Japanese expansion.  The northern island of Hokkaido, the center of the Ainu world, was annexed, and their lands were redistributed to Japanese settlers.

On Hokkaido, the hunter-gatherer way of life survived until the nineteenth century.  Missionary John Batchelor arrived there in 1877, and some of his Ainu friends still lived in the traditional manner.  In the woods, they hunted bear, deer, raccoons, foxes, and hares.  Along the coast were herring, cod, sardines, mackerel, sole, plaice, sharks, swordfish, black fish, bonito, whales, seals, walruses, porpoises, large crabs, shellfish, and seaweed.  The streams provided abundant salmon, pike, mud trout, and perch.  On a small scale, they grew sorghum, millet, beans, barley, and some vegetables.  Old-timers remembered the abundance of wildlife in the days of yesteryear, but this wealth was unknown to the younger folks.

The Ainu seemed to be close to extinction, just a few hundred survived.  Batchelor wrote a book, to preserve the memory of them.  He lamented, “Whenever I think of the quiet, free, un-anxious life they lived up there and compare that time with the present I cannot help sighing.  But those halcyon days departed when the tax collector and modern civilization came in.  I quite enjoyed seeing their life of quiet security and simplicity, alas, now gone for ever.”

The Hokkaido Aborigine Protection Act was passed in 1899.  The Ainu were forced to speak Japanese, take Japanese names, abandon ancient cultural practices, and become farmers.  The Japanese oppressed and exploited them.  By 1945, the Ainu language was nearly extinct.  Officially, in 1984, there were about 25,000 Ainu in Japan, but the actual number was probably closer to 200,000.  Many hid their identity to avoid discrimination.  There are few full-blooded Ainu today, but many of mixed blood.

In 1992, the Ainu were officially recognized as indigenous people by the United Nations.  At that time, the Japanese government still did not recognize their existence.  In 2008, the government finally recognized them as “an indigenous people who have their own language, religion, and culture.”

In 1853, the American Commodore Perry sailed into Tokyo, bringing an end to 200 years of isolation and self-sufficiency.  By 1914, Japan had become a bustling industrial nation.  Between 1910 and 2010, the population of Japan exploded from 51 million to 128 million. 

Japan is the world’s third biggest producer of nuclear energy.  It has 50 reactors, of which six are at Fukushima.  All will need to be safely decommissioned at some point in time, at great expense, to avoid future horrors, hopefully.

According to the CIA World Factbook, Japan is the world’s second largest importer of natural gas, and the world’s third largest importer of crude oil.  There will come a day when the supply of fossil energy becomes far more expensive and unreliable, and this will close the curtains on industrial Japan.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Japan is the world’s third largest importer of agricultural products.  Based on total calories consumed, Japan imports about 60 percent of its food each year.  In the coming decades, feeding the people will be a growing challenge.

The Ainu story is just one more rerun of farmers stomping wild people.  On the bright side, they were lucky to enjoy a beautiful existence for thousands of years, as our wild ancestors once did.  The Japanese story is just one more rerun of becoming addicted to an unsustainable habit, leading to reckless overshoot, zooming down the fast lane to helter-skelter.  Circle the progress in this picture.  Following the collapse of the global civilization, could we turn off the reruns?  Could we learn some vital lessons from our mistakes?  Could we envision a way of life that works?

Ainu, First People of Japan, The Original & First Japanese  [7 minute video]

Ainu Museum

Batchelor, John, Ainu Life and Lore, Kyobunkwan, Tokyo, 1926.

Diamond, Jared, “Japanese Roots,” Discover Magazine Vol.  19 No.  6 (June 1998).

Fackler, Martin, “Japanese Roots Surprisingly Shallow,” The Japan Times, August 31, 1999.

Hudson, Mark, “Japanese Beginnings,” A Companion to Japanese History, edited by William M.  Tsutsui, Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, U.K., 2009.

Kambayashi, Takehiko, “Japan's Ainu Hope New Identity Leads To More Rights,” The Christian Science Monitor, June 9, 2008. 

Lee, Richard B., and Daly, Richard, eds., The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1999.

Starr, Frederick, The Ainu Group at the Saint Louis Exposition, The Open Court Publishing Company, Chicago, 1904.  [Free download from Google Books, well illustrated.]

“The Ainu: A people, at Last,” The Economist, July 12, 2008.

Walker, Brett L., The Conquest of Ainu Lands — Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion 1590-1800, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2001.

Neither Wolf Nor Dog



One of the most tragic stories in human history describes the spread of civilization into the lands of the wild and free.  This story has countless variations, in every region of the world, and they rarely end happily, with the wild and free expelling the invaders.  Instead, what usually happened was that the civilized people proceeded to kill or enslave the natives, and then destroy the ecosystem, which eventually doomed the civilization.

In New England, the European invaders tried to transform the Indians into submissive, hard-working Christian farmers.  This plan enjoyed little success.  In the 19^th century, the strategy changed.  Indians were herded into concentration camps called reservations, or gunned down if they resisted.  The Indians were hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned.

The first wave of my Norwegian ancestors immigrated in 1879 and settled in the eastern regions of Iowa and North Dakota — recently the home of the Lakota and vast herds of bison.  This was three years after Custer was defeated at Little Big Horn, and eleven years before the last group of free Lakota was exterminated at Wounded Knee.  The world would be a happier place today if everyone had stayed at home, spent time with therapists working through their superiority and domination complexes, developed effective family planning systems, and learned how to live in harmony with their land.

Kent Nerburn’s book, Neither Wolf Nor Dog, presents the Lakota perspective on the European invasion, as seen through the eyes of “Dan,” a 78 year old elder (1913-2002).  It’s a perspective that white folks are rarely exposed to, unfortunately.  Dan had many important ideas that he wanted to pass along to the younger generations of all peoples, and Nerburn compiled them into a book.  The format of the oratory was very laid back — riding around Indian country in an old Buick with two elders, a big dog, and a cloud of cigarette smoke.

Dan was a traditional Lakota who had no affection for white government, white religion, or white people.  He had been angry all his life at what the whites had done to his land and his people.  The conquest provided no benefits for the Lakota, it was a complete disaster, a toxic explosion of greed, craziness, and injustice.  Yet white historians described the conquest in glowing terms — brave pioneers conquering and civilizing an untamed wilderness — progress!  God bless America!

The perspective in Lakota country could not be more different.  In their eyes, the conquest of America resembled something like the 2011 tsunami of east Japan that erased everything in its path.  The bison were exterminated, the forests were eliminated, the prairies were plowed, and contagious disease killed millions.  They shot the buffalo just to kill them!  They had no respect for the land or the beings that lived there.

When Indians killed “innocent” white settlers, the whites howled about barbaric savages and bloody massacre.  But the Indians had little choice.  The invaders intended to completely erase Indian society, even if this included exterminating every Indian.  The whites relentlessly advanced.  The soldiers were young men who had been hired to kill the “animals” that stood in the path of empire, and many of them took pleasure in killing.  There was no possibility of negotiation, because the invaders broke every agreement they made.  There was nowhere to flee to.  Surrender promised cultural obliteration. 

For the whites, the land was not alive and sacred — it was a treasure to be seized and exploited as quickly as possible.  The Lakota saw the land as their sacred mother, and they treated her with great respect.  Dan could never understand why, despite their good treatment, mother had gotten angry and punished the Lakota with invasion, diseases, and harsh winters.  Dan wondered what she had in store for the whites, who have shown no respect whatsoever.  We’ll surely find out.

One day, Nerburn drove Dan through his village on the reservation, an impressive scene of rundown houses, junk cars, and trash.  White people typically drive through and perceive nothing but “a bunch of shit.”  Dan asked Nerburn what he thought Indians saw when they visited a white city.  “We say the same thing.”  “You see a dirt path with a pop can next to it and you think that is worse than a big paved highway that is kept clean.  You get madder at a forest with a trash bag in it than at a big shopping center…”

White people are fascinated with the idea of freedom, because they have so little freedom in their lives.  Dan saw that whites are confined in a world of cages — their fenced property, their permanent home, their rulers, their bosses, their laws, their religious beliefs.  Indians have always enjoyed great freedom, and they had no desire to become farmers and join the whites in their world of miserable cages. 

This is why the whites had Sitting Bull murdered.  He didn’t want to sign treaties, because that would turn his people into blanket Indians.  They would turn white.  Sitting Bull said “I do not wish to be shut up in a corral.  All agency Indians I have seen were worthless.  They are neither red warriors nor white farmers.  They are neither wolf nor dog.”

After Sitting Bull was gunned down, many of his people fled to Wounded Knee, with soldiers in pursuit.  The weather was frigid, but they didn’t dare make fires, fearing that they would be discovered.  They were cold, hungry, and weak when the soldiers caught them.  The Indians were disarmed, then all of them were mowed down with machine guns — men, women, children, and the elderly.

The climax of the story came when Dan and Nerburn spent a night at the Wounded Knee cemetery, in a realm of powerful spirits.  Throughout his life, Dan had remained in close contact with the spirits of his ancestors.  The invasion had filled his life with pain, rage, and sorrow.  The injustice was unbearable.  Why did the Creator allow this to happen?  His ancestors had died running. 

Dan prayed for healing.  He was sure that the passage of generations would eventually bury the anger.  Peace would eventually return.  This is a book I will never forget.

 

Kent Nerburn, Neither Wolf Nor Dog, New World Library, Novato, California, 1994.  Due to popular demand, Nerburn wrote a second book about Dan, The Wolf at Twilight (2009).

A 2017 Interview with Nerburn (HERE)

Neither Wolf Nor Dog movie trailer (HERE)